Lightroom Classic: Need better zooming

Can we have an improved zoom for Lightroom? At the moment you can pick 1, possibly 2 and then the toggle jumps around between 100%, fit, fill and whatever you have selected.With the advent of the radial tool, there is often the need to zoom out to 1/8 or even 1/16th.Photoshop has a great zoom, press a key and roll the mouse, how about implementing something like that, even if it has to do discrete steps300%, 200%, 100%, fill, fit, 50%, 25%, 12% 6%, that would be perfect.If there are logistical issues with the mouse wheel, how about actually making the CMD + and CMD - that is the current zoom actually work properly.This would be a worthy improvement for LR4 to LR5.

Zooming in LR is really cumbersome since LR1. If you compare it to Photoshop`s zooming and panning, LR`s method is REALLY bad! I want to be able to constantly zoom to any level, not just back and forth between 2 options or use a slider. I want PS`s animated zoom (scrubby zoom) and flick-panning. LR`s method is as bad as one can imagine!

My first LR and the zoom is really crummy. I have been so accustomed the PSE scroll wheel zoom option,it is simply a better way to zoom. It surprises me that LR really gave it little thought or too much. PSE has much better zoom and clone tools,also Helicon is much better.

LR's two-level zoom/pan system is absolutely my favorite system by far. I hate having to go to PS and deal with the cruddy zoom-by-steps, select had tool or hit space bar, control-alt-0 to get back out nonsense.

I'd like some improvements to LR's zoom tool, but losing the two-level click and pan system would make me very angry.

Your comment above fits perfectly with my request, I did not ask for any changes to the click / pan, just CMD + to step through the zoom options and CMD - to zoom back back out
No reason to stop Z from meaning zoom into 100%.

By far the most intelligent update to the Z button would be to implement the to zoom into 100% to where the cursor is, What do you think of that Lee Jay?

Lee J
Quote - Edit - Preferences - Interface - Tweaks - Zoom clicked point to center
so you must always start your edits at the centre where your mouse is.
I've suggested it zooms to where your mouse cursor is, not the centre, not where your last edit was.

once I translated your comment JL, I examined what I think you tried to say.

I now have ZOOM CLICKED POINT TO CENTRE.

for example
Im in spot mode and want to zoom.
pressing Z zooms the picture to the last edit
pressing space gives you the zoom icon and then yes you can zoom to where you click, I assume that is what your comment above means.
It is still a 2 hand control, it works, I guess I will have to learn it, but its not as simple as simply pressing Z ( or space when not using a tool) and zooming to where the mouse cursor is.

As someone who is in the middle of switching from Aperture to LR, the zoom key functionality makes me crazy. It's a total and complete charlie foxtrot.

In Aperture, pressing z toggles zoom between 100% and zoomed to fit on the image where your cursor is at the moment. So this could be useful to extremely quickly inspect different details on the image by just moving your cursor, hitting z, hitting z again, moving to another point, repeat, etc.
Lightroom instead zoom to the point you last selected and keeps that (wtf?).

But that's just for convenience. The real problem comes with brushes.
I spend almost 50% of the editing time playing with brushes.

With Aperture, I can select a brush, make edits, then move my cursor to one position and press z to zoom in, continue doing more precise edits, then press z again to go back, etc.

Using Lightroom, I didn't find any other way to zoom into different parts on the image, other than closing the brush, using zoom tool and going back to the brush.
Or, use the navigator to move my zoom.
Both options are horrible.

I would at least like to have an option for the z key to go to where my cursor is, not where it was the last time.

You can also hold down Space and then drag with your mouse to move the image while editing a brush adjustment, but the zoom only changes in big increments. A scrubby zoom should easily be possible to implement now that LR6 has GPU support.

Hitting the spacebar makes it a bit easier, but it still needs a click. And it's not as fast as it should be.
Besides, I'm completely wasting the two-axis scroll on my Magic Mouse as both directions only change the brush size.

Point being, these things should be configurable to the user. I also couldn't believe there is no way to change these shortcuts in the settings...

The max zoom system accessed with cmd-= (aka cmd-+) and cmd-- is not too useful. The user cannot smoothly advance the zoom with cmd-+ and then back out with cmd--. You have to set the max zoom with a menu and then you jump from 1:1 to the max. Huh? That is just plain stupid. Lots of extra mouse clicks. Basically you zoom by menu selection. Back in the 1970's we did that because we had no choice. We have better technology now.

Apple had this figured out with Aperture. Granular zoom control, navigator and granular zoom level in full screen... LR zoom is close to worthless. You have to get out of full screen to fiddle with it if you guess wrong.

After using PS for years and using LR now for cataloging I can't believe how clumsy and awkward the zooming is. Why the stupid presets? at least give users the option to cycle through using CMD =/- as in PS.And this thread started 5 years ago? Way to listen Adobe!

Like a lot of UI choices, this should be done EXACTLY the way Aperture implements it. Seriously guys, zoom blows in Lightroom. Its awful. Worthless. Whoever approved the implementation should be fired.

I recently posted a question to Adobe Support on Twitter and this was the response:

"Hi John, we're really sorry for that. What I can do from here that I will notify the team about this feature request but I am not sure will this feature will be incorporated in Lightroom in the future.Thanks."

In other words: "don't hold your breath, we have more important AI things to add than helping with basic function"